March 10, 2007
-
ART WARS continued
The Logic of Dreams
From A Beautiful Mind–
“How
could you,” began Mackey, “how could you, a mathematician, a man
devoted to reason and logical proof…how could you believe that
extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that
you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world?
How could you…?”Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with
an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or
snake. “Because,” Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern
drawl, as if talking to himself, “the ideas I had about supernatural
beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I
took them seriously.”Ideas:
These
numbers may, in the mad way so well portrayed by Sylvia Nasar in the
above book, be regarded as telling a story… a story that should, of
course, not be taken too seriously.Friday’s New York numbers (midday 214, evening 711) suggest the dates 2/14 and 7/11.
Clicking on these dates will lead the reader to Log24 entries
featuring, among others, T. S. Eliot and Stephen King– two authors not
unacquainted with the bizarre logic of dreams.A link in the 7/11 entry leads to a remark of Noel Gray on Plato’s Meno and “graphic
austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and
figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the
slave.”Also Friday: an example of graphic austerity– indeed, Gray graphic austerity– in Log24:
This
illustration refers to chess rather than to geometry, and to the mind
of an addict rather than to that of a slave, but chess and
geometry, like addiction and slavery, are not unrelated.
Friday’s
Pennsylvania numbers, midday 429 and evening 038, suggest that the
story includes, appropriately enough in view of the above Beautiful Mind excerpt, Mackey himself. The midday number suggests the date 4/29, which at Log24 leads to an entry in memory of Mackey.(Related material: the Harvard Gazette of April 6, 2006, “Mathematician George W. Mackey, 90: Obituary“– “A memorial service will be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church on April 29 at 2 p.m.“)
Friday’s Pennsylvania evening number 038 tells two other parts of the story involving Mackey…
As Mackey himself might hope, the number may be regarded as a reference to the 38 impressive pages of Varadarajan’s “Mackey Memorial Lecture” (pdf).
More
in the spirit of Nash, 38 may also be taken as a reference to
Harvard’s old postal address, Cambridge 38, and to the year, 1938, that
Mackey entered graduate study at Harvard, having completed his
undergraduate studies at what is now Rice University.Returning
to the concept of graphic austerity, we may further simplify the
already abstract chessboard figure above to obtain an illustration that
has been called both “the field of reason” and “the Garden of Apollo”
by an architect, John Outram, discussing his work at Mackey’s undergraduate alma mater:
Let us hope that Mackey,
a devotee of reason,
is now enjoying the company
of Apollo rather than that of
Tom O’Bedlam:
For John Nash on his birthday:I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars at mortal wars
In the wounded welkin weeping.
